Prepare to Dice Edition

Rant

Then I thought… if the king of France was playing D&D 5e in 1385, how many plate armors could he buy? As it turns out, using the entirety of the kingdom of France’s capital (including all taxes etc) for a year one could buy 2700 sets of plate armor.

A knight banneret (an “officer” or higher ranking knight) would need almost two full years of pay to buy a set, using the 5e price of 1500 gp. (The higher figure I found had them making around 860 gp per year… in full year-long service, I think?).

Theoretically, one gp in 1385 corresponds to around $3500 today. So the cost of plate armor in 5e would correspond to maybe 5 million USD. That seems quite a bit too much, compared to the 3-18 “gp” (livre / pound) that’s in the sources I’ve found.

I saw a youtube clip about an “exploit” in D&D 5e, wherein a level 8-isch druid summons a bunch of pixies with a spell, and asks the pixies to Polymorph the entire party to t-rexes. Apparently, it breaks the game… but I just wondered… HOW? Is the game so inflexible that a bunch of low-INT dinosaurs can shatter the fragile form of the campaign? I get that it’s an unintentionally created exploit, but it should be at best a situational move unless everything always hinges on brute-force combat. I mean, making the entire party stupid can’t always be a good move. Maybe I’m overreacting, but I’ve seen a little too many videos talking about players “ruining” the campaign by abusing the system. I guess… challenge them more? Abuse the system back? Or, if you don’t like it, house rule it away. It’s not as if it’s some kind of computer game that needs to be patched by the developer. I don’t know why this even merits a post. Maybe I’m tired of some of this mainstream 5e content. Maybe I was expecting something more than an 8th level party getting to be tyrannosaurs for a while. I don’t know.

(This is not supposed to be a personal attack or anything. There’s just a lot of D&D content youtube recommends to me that’s just not what I enjoy or look for).

You know, this thing. I sent in a request, and expected one back. I’ve not heard anything since, despite the date for getting something to write being the 22nd, four days ago. They haven’t answered any of the comments on the blog, and I can’t seem to find any sort of contact info.

Anyone know anything? There seems to be at least one other person who’s missing their assignment, so I can hope it’s not just me messing up my email in the submission form…

I’m back in school since a few weeks now. The year-2 term-1 of computer science is pretty much a constant stream of large assignement, meaning that coupled with me working on my campaign (and the other campaign), my posting rate is not that good. Sorry.

So after some wiggling around, it seems I still have the old four D&D classes in Disposable Heroes: the Fighter, Magic-user, Cleric, and Thief (though in slightly different forms). I’ve already written somewhat about using them as personality types rather that jobs, which I think works better for some reason… Though that requires a somewhat flexible advancement system for completeness. Here’s the short verision:

Fighter (slayer): lives for fighting stuff (but may use excuses for why that is), therefore fights well and solves things through violence.

Cleric (zealot): lives for their god(s) and their own role as a the voice of god(s), therefore speaks well and may work miracles.

Thief (trickster): lives for the thrill of getting in the way of power and danger, therefore has ways to cheat both people and fate.

Mage (sorcerer): lives for learning the Truth and Magic, therefore can use magic like no others.

The Seeker class is probably scrapped. Though it is an interesting concept I’m not sure it fits in or is usable as it is now. It might return again. It’s basically some kind of charisma person (leader, bard, aristocrat) that goes delving to build up a reptutation and presence enough to charisma around. It’s just slightly off.

I’m not sure if it’s ironic or fitting that it went all the way around.

And now I can barely remember why I started this post… It’s been lying around. Might as well post it. I’ll just end it on the point that while the four old classes in theory cover most niches the way they are executed or described are not always perfect.

Here’s something I thought about a week ago: armor being effective against different damage types. This was on the subject of a Dark Souls-like tabletop RPG, and I was wondering if there was any good way to implement different damage and defense types in the game without it becoming too cluttered.

So, if you want to have different armors being good against different things, what then? Well, the first thing I thought of was not every armor having a defense score against every damage type. So only if the armor had a notable defense against a damage type would it gain a modifier there, to stop things removing 1 point of damage from 12 different things and then also reducing damage from a few other damage types by 9, 4, 13, and 2481. That works fine when the computer’s counting, but gets a bit messy when you have to keep track of which of the damage types is reduced by 13.7% because you’re wearing the witch’s top hat of doom.

I’m exaggerating, but there are obviously things that don’t work as well in tabletop games that they do in computer games. I was trying to come up with something that didn’t require you to track more than (1) what defenses the armor affects, (2) what the damage reduction is, and (3) possible special effects (as usual). So there’s a few ways to do that. First off, you could roll with D&D 5e style resistance to damage types (take half damage), or roll with one flat number for all damage types (either dependant on the armor or stats).

So well… that was a long way to say I might have had a (probably old) idea for armor. Yeah… that. Heh, this is barely a good filler post :p

I might elaborate or decide on things if/when I run my Dark Souls thing.

Well, would you look at that? It’s 2017. I will probably forget that for a few months, writing 2016 when prompted (as usual). That’s not the point, however. I just thought I’d write a few things for the new year.

First off, I’m going to try making a review, specifically of the Unframed – the Art of Improvisation for Game Masters book that I recieved as a christmas present. This might even be my next post here. I’ve read a third of it, and it’s quite interesting so far.

And then there’s my goal for 2017: actually publish a PDF on my blog (!) I’d like to finish something to the point where I can put it out on the web with a clean conciencse. We’ll see how it goes, and what actually gets posted here.

Except for that I will probably continue just like before. (Anticlimatic? Heh)